The law needed approval from the U.S. Justice Department to ensure that it complies with the Voting Rights Act before it could take effect.

The new plan, like Virginia’s last map, includes one majority-minority district.

The House passed the same plan last year, but it was never taken up by the then Democratic-controlled Senate, which advanced a proposal that would have created a district in which black voters are a sizeable minority, in addition to another district in which they hold a majority.

Senate Democrats had said a new minority “influence district” would ensure that the state’s congressional delegation was more likely to reflect the state’s demographics. Though almost 20 percent of Virginia’s population is black, only one of its members of Congress is African American.

But the new GOP-led Senate voted this year for the original House plan.

States must redraw their legislative and congressional maps every 10 years in response to population shifts to ensure that each district contains about the same number of people and all state residents have equal representation in Congress.

A group of Virginia voters filed lawsuits in both state and federal court in November accusing the General Assembly of violating the state Constitution by failing to complete a redistricting plan in 2011. But the lawsuits were tossed.